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Tuesday, January 8, 2013

eighteen: katrina vandenberg and john reimringer

Katrina Vandenberg is the author of Atlas and co-author of the chapbook, On Marriage. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Southern Review, The American Scholar, Orion, Post Road, Poets and Writers,
and other magazines. She has received fellowships from the McKnight,
Bush, and Fulbright Foundations; been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at
the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; and held residencies at the Amy
Clampitt House, the Poetry Center of Chicago, and the MacDowell Colony.
She teaches in The Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University in
Saint Paul, Minnesota, and lives four blocks from campus with her
husband, novelist John Reimringer, and their daughter Anna.

A former newspaper editor and a graduate of the MFA program at the
University of Arkansas, John Reimringer lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota,
with his wife, the poet Katrina Vandenberg. Vestments is his first novel.

Tell us about your relationship to your art.KV: I had a magical
first-grade teacher, Mr. MacDonald. He was a former opera singer and Fulbright
fellow, and he believed that children were capable of learning difficult
concepts. He taught us songs in French, and complex math using abacuses. He
also taught us to use the ITA, the Initial Teaching Alphabet. ITA is a
now-defunct education fad, and there are lots of downsides to it, but the up
side is that even a five-year-old can write long stories using its symbols,
right away. When I think of the best part of my relationship to writing, I
think of him. Nothing’s hard if you’re playing.JR: Katrina dealt with
beginnings, I’m going to deal with the present. My relationship to my art is at
arm’s length right now. I’m absorbed in our 14-month-old daughter, Anna, and
absolutely enjoying her, and I don’t feel any particular need to work on my
next novel at the moment. I will, maybe even soon, but at some point in this
first year I was not writing it and feeling guilty about it. It was affecting
my enjoyment of being a parent, and so I made a conscious decision to set novel
writing (or the guilt about not doing it) aside for the moment. And instead I’m
working on a screenplay of my first novel, which is creative, but not so much
generative.What's a project (yours or another's) that has been
exciting you lately?KV: It’s lyric essay. I
can’t talk about it yet. Right now, it feels like a good secret. I also don’t
want to talk about it because it’s going to take me a while to finish it — in
addition to being a mother, I teach full-time. Those two endeavors, plus
supporting my husband in his work, eat all of the energy I have and then some.In general, I’m really
excited by lyric essay and the hybrid forms that poetry and creative nonfiction
are taking on. There’s so much great new writing. I’ve loved John D’Agata’s
anthologies, the work of Eula Biss, Lia Purpura’s On Looking, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.JR: I’m co-writing a
screenplay based on my first novel, Vestments.
I’m working with a local guy who splits his time between here and LA, and has
written, directed, and produced indies, made-for-TV, and a couple of Hollywood
features. He’s very serious about mentoring me as a screenwriter, and I’ve
really enjoyed working with him and in the new form. Movies seem like a big
form, but really a screenplay is a very tight space in which to fit a novel, so
one has to make all kinds of decisions as to what stays and what goes, what
will best move the story forward, and so forth. I think the entire process is
making me a better novel writer.Tell us a little of your motherhood / fatherhood journey.KV: I wanted children with
my first partner, Tim — we were together from the time I was 20 until I was 23
— but he had hemophilia and was HIV positive, and he refused. He was probably
right. He didn’t want to infect a child or me. He didn’t want to bring into the
world a child he wouldn’t live to raise. Those children, if we’d had them,
would be in college now.I was 36 when my husband
and I started trying to have a child, and I miscarried three times and had to
have surgery before I could carry our daughter Anna. Do we ever love that
little girl! Now we both would have loved it if we had started a family sooner.
But what can I say? She is the child who came when the time came, and we
rejoice for her.I’m not explicit about all
this in my new book, The Alphabet Not
Unlike the World, but you can see flashes, if you look. Anna was born
shortly before the book went to press, and it was a fun coincidence that the
cover has a big letter A on it; our friend Michael saw it and quipped, “A is
for Anna.” His remark’s the dedication.JR: Absolutely. I’ve just
published my first novel, just really settled into a teaching career at
Normandale Community College. Just fathered a child. I wish I’d been able to
accomplish all of those things earlier, but I couldn’t be happier than I am at
the moment, so it was all worth the wait.

What are some crucial elements of your process? How
has that changed since having children?KV: I always loved having
solitary time for my thoughts to meander. That kind of time no longer exists in
my life. It’s frustrating. Some days, I can hear a poem in my head all day
long, and can’t stop to receive it. On the other hand, I’ve never felt more
creatively awake.I write when I can,
sometimes a manic three minutes’ worth of notes while Anna is tugging on my
shirt and saying, “Read!” If I sit down with my notebook and my coffee in the
morning, I have no idea whether I’ve got two minutes or an hour. The result, so
far, is that I have nothing that feels polished or finished. But I do have a
haphazard bunch of drafts to tear into, when the time comes. I write the drafts
so fast and fierce I don’t remember writing them, so when I find them in my
notebook later, it’s as if someone else wrote them. That’s exciting. I wish that I could say:
Yes, I did this, and look how well it worked! The truth is, I don’t know what
will happen with that pile of messy pages. Which makes it no different than
writing ever is, I guess.JR: Procrastination has
always been crucial to my process, in both teaching and writing. What I’ve
found so far with a child is that she’s a great motivation not to
procrastinate. If I’ve got a stack of papers to grade, and we’ve got childcare
or it’s Katrina’s turn to watch Anna, I sit down and do it with no hesitation
or fuss because that window’s only going to be open for so long. You don’t
leave anything until the last minute, because with a child in your life, they
may need you in that last minute. So, even though I haven’t been writing in
this past year, I’m looking forward to the moment I decide I’m ready to return
to it, because I think these lessons in seizing the moment are going to be very
useful and liberating.

What are some of the ways your family
and your art interact?JR: At four months old,
Anna sat on my knee one afternoon in the Hilton lounge bar at the AWP
conference in Chicago and she and short-story writer Alan Heathcock took turns
screaming at one another. Is that what you mean?KV: My family has always
appeared in my work, but it’s not really “them” – mostly, something personal
serves as a trigger for a bigger idea, in the way personal essay fans out. You
can see this in both my books, but especially the more recent. It’s nice to
live with a writer, because John gets it.Once, on my way to a
reading, I was practicing poems aloud as John drove. I read the poem “On
Marriage.” We then hatched a plan: during the open mic, he would get up, clear
his throat, and announce “On Marriage: A REPLY.” Then he would scream, WHAT DO
YOU WANT FROM ME, KATRINA?! I HAD TO PUT THE PLASTIC ON THE WINDOWS! EVERYTHING
IS NOT A MOMENT! We laughed so hard I thought we’d crash.Do you find your attitude towards your art might be
different because of your parenting / has it changed since you became a parent?

KV: I watch Anna struggle
all day, every day, at something like getting applesauce in her mouth with a
spoon. She tries and tries. She fails and fails. Then, one day, I realize she is holding her spoon in such a way that
the applesauce is going into her mouth, or she’s crawling, or whatever, and I
remember once again that trying and falling short is the norm. I had my
daughter late, so I spent half my life in the squeaky-clean and shiny adult
world; how refreshing to really know again, with my body, that life and art are
usually messy, with results that often aren’t the ones I planned on. I’m much
kinder to myself as an artist because of her.JR: I’d second that. Moreover,
following Anna through the world, both literally and intellectually, pulls me
in all sorts of directions I wouldn’t go on my own. I’ve spent more time
sitting on the floor or on the grass in the backyard in the last year than in
my entire adult life. I’ve learned to play “Do, Re, Mi” on the xylophone. I’m
not sure exactly how all of this will affect my writing, but it certainly will,
in ways I’ve yet to see unfold. And that unfolding will only continue as Anna
grows and her interests multiply.

Are your children ever subjects in your art?

KV: I think I address this
in the question above, about how my family and art interact. I’ll add that
writing about one’s child is tricky, because there’s an inherent power
imbalance. It’s one thing to write about pregnancy, or motherhood, or
fertility, and another to write about her
attempting to make her way through the world.JR: There will be more
children appearing in the next book. Vestments
is about a young priest doubting his vocation, and part of his doubt is that he
wonders about having children. Fancy that. So part of the next book is going to
be about characters dealing with parenthood. But it won’t be so much Anna in
the book, as simply the experience of parenthood and permutations of that. In
part because people in novels tend to have some serious dysfunctions, and I
hope our family is more functional than the people I’m going to be writing.How does travel figure into your art? Do/did your
children come along? How has that worked out?KV: We don’t travel much
now. Once, we left Anna for two days with a nanny, for a conference. We brought
wine glasses and our writing stuff with us, but all we did with our free time
was sleep. We also took Anna to Chicago for the AWP conference, but spent most
of our time in the hotel room, because the crowds at the bookfair freaked her
out. Both my books were deeply inspired by fellowships elsewhere — in the
Netherlands, in the Berkshires. We’re still working this one out.JR: Like so much else, I’m
looking forward to traveling with Anna and seeing the ways showing her the
world—and following her through it—broadens the experience. As with the writing,
this past year hasn’t been a convenient time for travel, and I’m perfectly okay
with that. Except for a trip to friends’ cabin in Wisconsin last New Year’s,
and the writing obligations Katrina mentioned, we haven’t been out of the city
limits overnight in the past year. I’ve never been so rooted in a place, and at
the same time have never had my mind stretched in so many directions.What about promoting the arts with
your own children--any fun projects to share? KV: She’s still pretty
little. She does love looking at a book of Renoir paintings from her friend
Gretchen. I try not to wish her any older, but imagine in our future there’s
libraries, museums, foreign travel, concerts. . . .JR: Not yet. But even
though it seems as if Katrina and I have had no time to read in the last year,
we must do enough to have made an impression. Books are Anna’s favorite
pastime. She likes to get cozy on the couch and be read to. She likes to sit on
the floor and thumb through her board books by herself. She has a one-syllable
title for each of her books, and she brings them to us saying “House” (The House in the Night) or “Moon” (Good Night Moon) or “Jam” (Jamberry). Needless to say, we’re
keeping well-hidden our copy of Go the
Fuck to Sleep.How do you escape?KV:The best escape is getting up before
anyone else, when the house is dark and my head is clear. The spell lasts until
someone else wakes up, or I make the mistake of checking my e-mail. Or taking a
walk, which can be done under the guise of running errands. I sneak books
again, like I did when I was little. I’ve pretended to be walking a book back
to the neighborhood library and instead stood behind the garage, in the alley,
reading. Now the secret’s out.JR: I’ve always been a
night person, and have fought all my life to be a morning person. I love the
early morning, perhaps because I see it so rarely. And I feel like morning
people are more virtuous than I am. (I’m certain Katrina is more virtuous than
I am, even if she does sneak books in the alley.) But, as with so many things,
having a kid around has forced me to take a straight look at myself, and the
fact is that if I’m going to get creative work done in the near future, it’s
going to be after Anna goes to bed.What advice do you have for expectant mothers / fathers in
your field?KV: 1. You’ve added a
full-time job to your life, so you can’t
do everything the way you did before. Be patient and realistic.2. Your e-mail inbox is a
to-do list created by other people. You don’t always have to get on that train.3. Your writing is worth
the cost of child care, and often makes you a better parent. 4. Taking notes for later
counts.5. Chekhov said, “If you
want to work on your art, work on your life.” You will.JR: The child is an
opportunity. Remember that in art, restriction forces your creativity in new
directions—the restrictions that dramatic structure puts on a novel, for
instance, or choosing to write a sonnet puts on a particular poem. Form in art
is a restriction that forces creativity. If you choose to have a child, you’ve
chosen to add a new form to your life. Be open to the opportunities your choice
will create. I should follow my own advice.